The Choice Is obVIOuS

My wife and I have been scouting around for a family car since last year.

Since car price and future expenditures are the major concerns, we only target for a 1.6 litre or below. I won’t drive to work because my work place is relatively near to my home and therefore we only aim to get an OPC (Singapore off-peak car). Also plan to convert it to a normal car 2 years later and trade-in for another newer and bigger car by the 5th year. Everything is set, but which car to get?!

I’m interested in quite a few cars initially, Nissan Latio, Mazda 3 SP, Kia Rio, Kia Cerato, … but eventually we only went for test drives for Toyota Altis, Toyota Vios, Hyundai Avante and Hyundai Verna. Thanks to my friends for their advices…

Overall my favorite is Hyundai Avante due to the fact that it is bigger, better looking, newer engine, more advanced features than the rest etc, but after some considerations of the scrap value, super-light steering wheel, it is also the most expensive one among the 4 cars; we wrote off this option. Hyundai Verna, the interior design is simply not suit my taste, even though it is the cheapest among the 4 cars we’ve tested; therefore we droped this option too.

Now the remaining choices, both Toyota, both made in Thailand. Altis is only about 5.6K more than Vios with more advanced features, but since it is bigger and fuel consumption is not as efficient as Vios, and the worst thing is we really do not like the interior.

So, ta-da, we have chosen a medium silver metallic colored Toyota Vios 1.5E with the standard deluxe package.

I especially like the black leather seats and the single tone grey-black interior design. It is a smaller car, less some nice-to-have advanced features, but it suits our needs, and my liking.

Very excited, should be receiving our very first car within the next 2-3 weeks. Borneo Motors’ sales engineer just informed me that she has secured a COE for us in the first bidding for 2007.

BTW, today is also my birthday, so happy birthday to me 🙂